fake warez (thing)

I also had a fun fake warez experience in the days of BBSing. I had recently moved to LaCrosse, Wisconsin, a city of about 50,000. I had spent the majority of my life in Colorado, which had a huge BBS scene with hundreds of places to call. When I moved to Wisconsin, the only boards I could find were in Madison, which was about 90 miles away, and thus was long-distance.

Somehow I managed to find one BBS that actually was in LaCrosse, and the sysop actually went to the high school I was enrolled at. We became sort-of-friends and I began to find a small but real "BBS scene" in LaCrosse. I never paid any attention to online games like Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD) or Usurper until I moved to Wisconsin. I soon knew a few people who called BBS's also, so it was actually fun to slaughter them in such an environment.

Soon I met a guy with the same first name as I who bragged constantly about his up-and-coming BBS. My new friends highly disliked him for some reason, and ridiculed his proposed name, "Electric Dreams." He bragged that it would have elite warez and all of the best online games, and that it would be the best BBS in all of LaCrosse. For some reason, I resolved that I would write my first trojan horse, and upload it to him. It would be written in the guise of a new online game, and would do its worst during the "installation" process.

I don't remember the exact name, something to the effect of Blood Splatterer, Brain Smasher, Skull Crusher, something evil and cool sounding (for a 14 year old). It was written in pure QuickBASIC, compiled to a small EXE file with a big phoney data "install" file to bloat the ZIP file size a bit. It was a recursive directory tree deleter, basically the equivalent of "DELTREE C:\, Y <enter>." It had a nice percentage indicator that ticked off as it wiped out the hard drive.

Once it was written I was in the position where I had to decide to actually use it. It was like making a bomb and deciding how to blow it up. I had experienced a lot of his first hand cockiness, so I gathered up the courage and foolishly uploaded it from my own house, after opening a new fake account on his brand-spanking-new BBS. I had called his board before, and he had an obnoxious habit of immediately breaking into chat whenever someone signed on. Inevitably this had to happen, so I had to pretend to be someone else and type in a different "style" to throw him off. I convinced him to try the game right away, after I was done checking the place out.

I felt bad about it, but couldn't help bragging to my friends. Somehow he quickly found out I did it, and confronted me at school, telling me that he had called the cops and I was in big trouble. Nothing ever came of it, but he demanded the source code so he could try to "reverse the damage." Given that it had simply deleted every file and directory off of his hard drive (including system/hidden/read only files), there wasn't much to be reversed. He did have a backup, and was back up and running in days. We became sort-of-friends after that.